Ask HN: When has humanities/history knowledge helped you in tech?

[amadeuswoo]

Personally, I've been reading about how historical empires handled delegation and trust—who gets autonomy, who needs oversight, how that scales. Finding it weirdly applicable to how I think about system design and working with AI tools.

Curious if others have pulled from history/humanities in ways that actually transferred.

[jbreckmckye]

I think a lot of programming - the more business focused, application minded stuff - is a kind of analytical philosophy. You spend a lot of time as a dev working on "domain logic" which requires you to be very exacting in your terminology and carefully distinguish between ideas.

You can go too far with this, and waste time on taxonomy, but for the most part it's a good idea to subject your classes, variables, components to some kind of philosophical scrutiny.

(My degree was in English Literature though, which doesn't help as much, though I think I'm pretty good at naming variables. £40,000 well spent!)

[amadeuswoo]

Always appreciate an English major in the wild. But I think taxonomy is only wasteful if it doesn't map to real distinctions, good naming saves debugging time like when untangling "what did we mean by 'user' here?".

Wittgenstein said the limits of language are the limits of the world after all

[Liphe]

I dig your mind. I'm working on a project that leverages historical insights and am looking for a technically skilled collaborator. Beyond that, I have several long-gestating concepts dating back to 2001 that require a dedicated team.

I'm envisioning the creation of an international collective, drawing inspiration from the underground movements of the 80s and 90s, but with a significantly broader scope, a stronger mission orientation, and a focus on impactful work that people can be proud of.

Essentially, I'm aiming to establish a digital family to drive a revolution, foster a cultural renaissance, establish new infrastructure, become a market leader, and create innovative solutions that are both compelling and reliable.

By the way, I really like your name, Amadeuswoo – a great combination!

Ciao for now,

[fiftyacorn]

This was a long time ago but I done german with my engineering degree, and was required to do a half course in some cultural aspect of german. Timetabling meant i often had to take what was left - so id end up doing history of art class, or german history

It worked out ok in the end as you see the differences between arts and sciences - science courses collaboration was about getting the right answer most of the time, while arts was about defending your opinion

So the long term benefit has been my communication skills improved and helped me

[cafard]

Didn't Dykstra say that what one needed was mathematical maturity and the ability to express oneself well in one's native language? Shouldn't a decent education in the liberal arts provide or at least help with the latter?

[dapperdrake]

Just like with every endeavor that involves people.

If LLMs hallucinate enough it might also apply to managing them.

[elbci]

separation of concerns -> division of labor (hint: there's always a power imbalance even if it's hidden under reification)